SEO recovery consultant — August 2026 Google spam update (travel site)

We need a specialist in Google algorithm recovery, not a general SEO strategist. Our travel-related website was hit by the August 2026 Google spam update (rolled out Aug 18–21). We want someone who can diagnose why this site was affected and give us a clear, prioritized recovery plan. Our team will implement the work ourselves. This is not a retainer for ongoing SEO, content writing, link building, or “full SEO management.” If your pitch is keyword research, blog calendars, or generic technical SEO, please skip this post. What we need A live or recorded consulting call (likely more than one) where you walk through the site, Search Console patterns, and the update. A written audit focused on this update — not a 40-page generic crawl report. A concrete recovery strategy our team can execute: what to change, what not to change, order of operations, and how we’ll know it’s working. Before you recommend fixes, we expect you to state what you think this August 2026 spam update is doing in general (what it appears to target, what it does not target, and how travel / transactional sites have been behaving since rollout). What “affected” means for us Traffic and rankings dropped in a way that lines up with the August 18–21 window. We are not looking for a guess. We need a diagnosis tied to this site’s pages, templates, content patterns, and any policy-risk signals (scaled/thin/AI-looking content, doorway-style pages, template duplication, affiliate/travel-product patterns, etc.). Google described this as a normal global spam update. Public reporting so far has said it does not target link spam or site reputation abuse. Industry data after rollout showed unusually large ranking displacement versus a quiet July window. We want someone who has already been in those reports and recoveries — not someone reading the dashboard note for the first time. Must-have experience (proposals without this will be ignored) Documented work on sites hit by prior Google spam or core updates, with before/after results after your recommended actions were implemented. Specific examples: which update, what the site looked like, what you told them to change, what recovered and on what timeline. Redact client names if needed; keep the data. Comfort talking about the current August 2026 update before selling a package. Ability to separate “this site is spammy” from “this site got caught in a classifier / scaled-content / thin-template net and can recover with targeted cleanup.” Travel-site or international / transactional experience is a plus. Agency fluff is not. Deliverables Discovery call(s) Written diagnosis of why this site moved with this update Prioritized action list our internal team can execute (content, templates, internal linking, indexation, policy cleanup — only what is actually relevant) Success criteria and a realistic recovery window (no ranking guarantees) We will provide Search Console access / exports and the live URL after a short screening call. Do not ask us to hand over full access in the first proposal. How to apply In your proposal, answer these four items. Generic cover letters will be declined. What do you believe the August 2026 spam update is targeting in practice, and what is it not? 2–3 past update recoveries you personally led (update name, site type, what dropped, what you changed, what came back). How you would start on a travel-product site in the first 7 days without rewriting the whole domain. Your fee for: (a) a single diagnostic call, (b) a full audit + written strategy, (c) follow-up calls if we need them. Budget Open to a paid diagnostic call first, then a fixed audit/strategy fee. We will pay for expertise. We will not pay for a recycled Semrush PDF. Timeline Start this week. Audit + strategy within 7–10 days of kickoff.